Email campaigns

Sending email campaigns with epic48 is quite simple once you’ve got the hang of it. The easiest method of selecting contacts/companies for distribution is to add them all to a list or use one of the already existing lists/queries. To make your email appear in the list of available campaigns to send out, send the message as you wish everyone to receive it to campaign@landscapeontario.com Once it’s received, it will be processed and you’ll see it in the list with an option box next to it.

Put in a title for your email campaign that quickly describes it, like; Georgian Lakelands May Chapter Meeting Notice.

If you’re sending email to more than 150 addresses, it is recommended that you send the message after 5pm. Due to the nature of the how email works, the emails will actually grind the internet connection to a halt if you’re sending hundreds or thousands at once. It is also recommended not to send them too late as many people with Blackberries may not appreciate getting an email from you in the middle of the night.

Once an email has been sent you can make it available to be re-sent by clicking “Relaunch this email campaign” next to its title and status. This is set up so that you can send yourself a test message to ensure that everything is laid out the way you want the users to see it and then once confirmed, quickly re-send it to your desired recipients.

Avoiding SPAM filters
Tips from Ian:

  • Make sure you have content in your message, not just an image.
  • Make sure you have qualified your recipients. If someone who
    receives your message marks it as spam that counts against us all in the
    future, so don’t send to people who wouldn’t have any interest.
  • Make sure your message has plain text version and HTML versions
    (built automatically with Gmail or with epic48).
  • If you can’t say what you want to say without getting trapped by spam filters, put your message on the web…
    • For example: If you want to say; “Buy now™ but it keeps getting caught, try some other wording and link back to the web site where your full “Buy now™ message can be seen.

How email address selection works
This comes up often enough that it needs to be documented. When you check off a list from the epic48 selector the program returns a list of companyID numbers and contactID numbers. The email program functions two ways.

  1. If the program is supplied with a contactID. (eg someone that is on a commodity or committee group, a hort member)
    1. It selects one email address from that contact in the database.
    2. If there is no email address attached to that contact it continues to the company to find one there.
    3. It checks to see if the company has a membership record, if it does it and it has an email address selected (indicated with the little LO logo on the contact page) it selects that.
    4. Otherwise it selects the first available email address that’s attached to the company.
  2. If the program is supplied with a companyID (eg any type of membership category except Hort),
    1. It checks to see if the company has a membership record, if it does it and it has an email address selected (indicated with the little LO logo on the contact page) it selects that.
    2. Otherwise it selects the first available email address that’s attached to the company.
    3. If there are no email addresses attached to the company, it will then start searching the contacts if it hasn’t already
    4. It selects one email address from the first contact in the database.

It makes a whole lot more sense in the programming, but there it is in English.

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